Linux became the major operating system on everything except the desktop a few years ago.

XP Embedded 4 life!

Microsoft is giving a huge opportunity here for Linux to become a major player on desktop computers but Linux developers aren’t grabbing that chance.

I don’t see anyone paying OEM’s and ODM’s any type of benefits for pre-installing Linux and, as far as I know, Microsoft still pays them to load Windows on their laptops, desktops and X86 tablets.

Canonical once was in the right direction and was doing the right thing but they lost focus with their whole convergence thing, which is nifty but no one really needs.

Now we have Gnome and KDE that are trying to deliver high quality desktops but a good desktop is not good enough, the overall quality of applications must get better as well.

The world of desktop dominance is not a meritocracy. Case in point, Microsoft’s still leading it after ME, Vista, 8 and 10.

Until someone with a lot of money decides to back Linux and pay OEM’s a cut for them to preload Linux on laptops and what not, like Google does with Chrome, Windows will always lead the consumer desktop market.

Fun fact: if you want to get the full power from this Piton CPU, you’d better not use Python

Ah yes, parallel computing. Ask AMD how well parallel computing worked for them over the past 10-ish years.

If it’s OpenSPARC it should have CoolThreads (CMT) built in.

Still at 32nm and only 1GHz.

Princeton Piton Processor quick specifications:

25 modified OpenSPARC T1 cores

Directory-based shared memory

3 On-chip networks

Multi-chip shared memory support

1GHz clock frequency

IBM 32nm SOI process (6mm*6mm)

460 million transistors

“researchers aim is to design a chip that could be used specifically for massive computing systems in large data centers that handle cloud services, email services, search and social networking requests.”

Good luck beating Acorn RISC Machines.

Hell Fujitsu dropped SPARC for the 64-bit ARM-v8A in the upcoming Post-K supercomputer.

What’s the TDP on this critter?

I love this kind of stuff but this is a lab prototype that may never see implementation.

Password storage is something that has always worried me with browser sync features. Those password although not stored in plain text can be decrypted, this is a bit more serious than websites where they shouldn’t be able to recover the original password.

That doesn’t keep me from using those services, I just hope Mozilla and Google won’t mess up like Opera did.